Submarine Titans

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What's more dangerous than a Russian training exercise and crashes even more?

By IGN Staff

Welcome to Earth 2115. It's been a rough century. It seems that in 2037, the copyright for Armageddon expires and astronomers discover a comet heading right for the Earth. This little tidbit of information is received, as you would expect from a civilization as advanced as ours, with a panic that throws the world into an economic depression. There are a few nations that manage to keep things in perspective and immediately start grabbing simultaneously for the high ground, the sea floor, and whatever resources are handy. Once the comet hits environmental mayhem ensues. The impact wipes out most of the surface world and melts the polar ice caps. Out of this chaos arise two main organizations that have colonized the sea floor -- the militaristic White Sharks (Rambos in scuba gear) and the environmentally conscious Black Octopi (the underwater version of a kelp-hugging Green Party). But added to the mix is the Silicon -- a race of aliens that were hitching a ride on the comet and ended up on the seafloor as comet debris. Now these three groups are fighting for supremacy. That's where you enter.

Submarine Titans is a classic real time strategy game of gathering different types of resources and building ships and structures. It has a campaign mode and a single battle mode that allows you to set a variety of initial game elements -- resources, AI setting, equipage, technology. There are three mission choices for the random maps -- Kill Everything, Kill Everything Without Resources, and the vengeful Flagship Hunt. Submarine Titans also has an Internet game play with chat features and eight team mutiplayer capabilities, but I couldn't find any servers running at the time this was written. Hopefully the game will catch on more and we'll be able to find a little competition later, but those of you looking for Internet play now will be stuck in dry dock.

Most of the mission goals are the standard boiler plate that starts with "establish a base" and ends with "destroy all enemies." The campaign missions do have some interesting capture or escort elements, but still it came down to destroy all enemies. There are nice tutorials for all three factions that give you the basic rundown on their controls, but everything is pretty much your standard RTS fare. The tutorials also seem kind of redundant as the Sharks and the Octopi are basically the same, only with different philosophies. The White Sharks are the brute force types and the Black Octopi are of the technology/finesse school. The Silicons are played much more differently than the others. They need different resources for one thing, but design-wise they fall in between the other two races.

The game includes a handy assistant feature that you can activate to run the resources and/or the defenses for you. This saves a lot of time you would otherwise spend administering your bases. For the truly lazy the full game assist does everything so you can watch Dobie Gillis reruns and play the game at the same time. The future is now! Seriously though, the resource assistant will really take the tedium out of the game for those who just want to fight and ship the base management.

One limitation of Submarine Titans is the lack of variety of units. While your units all serve different purposes -- including mine layers, phantom subs, capture subs and repair subs -- you pretty much just control submarines. However, ships can be moved through five-depth settings, which does allow for some interesting new strategies to the RTS world. I liked taking an attack force to the highest level to avoid the defenders and then dropping down on the enemy base or stationing subs on the bottom of a valley floor to lay in wait for any unsuspecting enemy. But it's not as big a part of the game as you might think. Once the fighting starts there's just too much going on to think about or keep up with all of your ships if they're at different depths.

I liked the repair and command features of the subs. You can have the subs return to base to be repaired when they reach a certain level of damage -- 25% or 75%. Like the auto-administrate feature, this is a real time saver. The commands cover a good range of actions. I especially liked the ability to draw an attack box around a group of targets and the ability to select guard and defend options for buildings and units. In addition there are rally commands on the repair and submarine producing facilities so you can send your subs up to the front lines or a safe area as soon as they're made or repaired. Even with all this convenience, you have to watch for taking up transport or construction subs when you snatch a group of subs from an area in a hurry to attack or defend.

While Submarine Titans is nothing revolutionary when it comes to graphics, I like the different sea settings -- arctic, tropical, etc. -- and the various sea creatures that inhabit them such as rays, dolphins, eels, crabs, sharks, and the like. The menus are slick without being too busy or complicated and the ships and structures are well modeled. There zoom feature lets you see the details or get the big picture, which makes playing that much easier, and the map can be rotated through four directions to see around objects obscured by mountains. Close up the details are nice with bubbles and distortion in the water as the subs pass.

I generally enjoyed Submarine Titans, but there was major one problem I kept having. The final game is buggy and locked-up more than any game should. Sure, computers can be amazingly temperamental, but it happened incredibly frequently, and just became a nuisance that hurt an otherwise fun game.

Barring a few minor flaws and one major drawback, Submarine Titans is a good if conventional real-time strategy game. It doesn't break any barriers, but it adds to an already solid concept and is worth taking a look at if you're an RTS fan and you have the patience to bear with a crash or two or 25.

25 Million Years Ago, Man evolved out of the ocean. In 2047, He goes back! In the year 2047, a massive comet slams into the Earth's surface and the shell-shocked remnants of mankind descend into the liquid cradle of creation in order survive. After a hundred years, the resilient humans have slowly created a new life for themselves in the plains and mountains of this cool blue universe. But even in the ebbing stillness of the deep one harsh reality remains where man goes, war follows. Two distinct humanoid races have evolved and flourished in their seagoing colonies and now the oceans of the world are not big enough for them both.